How can I be notified of CUPS errors?

Pete Tirrell pete at fiestyturtles.com
Fri Oct 5 07:37:19 PDT 2007


I have a Hylafax server setup that prints to a network printer via CUPS.  It works great doing it's thing, except twice now we've had issues where the printer somehow fails and disables itself in CUPS.  We notice that a problem has happened (when someone realizes the incoming fax load has been sparse), and we have to reenable the printer.  Then it seems to work from then on.  So I have two questions:

First, how can I determine what is happening to cause the problem in the first place?  In the /var/log/cups error log I found this:

I [28/Sep/2007:10:52:24 -0400] Started backend
/usr/lib/cups/backend/socket (PID 22486) for job 10208.
E [28/Sep/2007:10:52:24 -0400] PID 22486
(/usr/lib/cups/backend/socket) crashed on signal 11!
I [28/Sep/2007:10:52:24 -0400] Hint: Try setting the LogLevel to
"debug" to find out more.
I [28/Sep/2007:10:52:26 -0400] [Job 10208] Backend returned status -11 (crashed)
I [28/Sep/2007:10:52:26 -0400] Saving printers.conf...

To fix it, I just end up having to enable the printer via the GUI (the command line interface has worked before, but didn't work yesterday).  Where should I look/try to do to find more info?

Second, how can I be notified of this error if it happens again in the future?  I played around with it some more and came up with *sort of* a
solution, but not really. I can do this:

grep -A 3 -B 3 -E "^E" /var/log/cups/error_log

and it will give me output if an error occurred. I could put this line
in crontab on a schedule, and I think that would send out notices if
it found an error. But I think that would also keep sending out the
same message until the error fell out of the grepped log file. I
want/need it to just send out one error notification when it comes
across one, and not send another until it sends detects another error.

Is there any sort of error reporting with CUPS?  Any help would be great - thanks!




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